%%%%%I first met Arthur Sze when we
read together in a benefit reading for Amigos Bravos, an environmental
group in Taos, New Mexico. At that time, he was well-known in New Mexico
as a distinctive and compelling presence in the poetry of the region. He
was co-publisher, with John Brandi, of Tooth of Time books, an esteemed
teacher at the Institute for American Indian Arts, and the author of
several noteworthy poetry collections. Since then, he has quietly and
by virtue of the quality of his work become a poet of national renown.
His selected poems, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper
Canyon Press 1998), was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry
Prize. %%%%%Arthur Sze has been
called one "of our best poets" by Charles Simic, and his poetry is
esteemed by writers who inhabit a broad band of the poetical spectrum.
His work has always been marked by a refinement of object and imagery.
Rich in allusions, his poetry evinces a preference for Asian
juxtaposition rather than Western rhetoric. In reading his work, while
there is a sense of a distinctive voice, the quality of voice strikes
the reader as a quality of mind, the subtle movements of a particular
intelligence, rather than as oratorical. %%%%% With the publication of The Silk
Dragon, Sze makes his debut as an equally exceptional translator.
The Silk Dragon includes translations that are the fruit of
thirty years of reading the originals, considering their qualities and
translating them into English. Rather than a complete anthology of
Chinese poetry, the translations follow the trajectory of Sze's
interests in Chinese literature, from the classic T'ang masters, Wang Wei, Li Po and
Tu Fu to important contemporary poets such as
Wen I-to and Yen Chen. Sze's introduction
provides insight not only into the process of translation but the
process of writing poetry altogether. The silk dragon, the title for
the collection, is Sze's metaphor for poetry, and as Michelle Yeh notes
in Sze's moving collection of Chinese poetry. . . each poem is a
miniature silk dragon, lustrous and magical in its beauty.

* * * * * * * *

Arthur Sze was born in New
York City in 1950 and is a second-generation Chinese American. He
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley
and is the author of seven books of poetry: The Silk Dragon:
Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), The
Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon, 1998),
Archipelago (Copper Canyon, 1995), River River (Lost
Road, 1987), Dazzled (Floating Island, 1982), Two Ravens
(1976; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1984), The Willow Wind
(1972; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1981). His poems have appeared in
numerous magazines and anthologies and have been translated into
Chinese, Italian, and Turkish. He has conducted residences at Brown
University, Bard College, Naropa Institute, and is a recipient of an
Asian American Literary Award, a Balcones Poetry Prize, a Lila
WallaceReader's Digest Writer's Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award
for Poetry, three Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Fellowships, two
National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a George
A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, a New Mexico Arts
Division Interdisciplinary Grand, and the Eisner Prize, University of
California at Berkely. He lives in Pojoaque, New Mexico, with his wife,
Carol Moldaw, and is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of
American Indian Arts.

Seiferle: In your very interesting introduction to The
Silk Dragon you write that translation of Chinese poems into
English has always been a source of inspiration for my own evolution as
a poet. Do you feel that the process of translation has been a kind of
poetic apprenticeship where you've learned your own craft or has it been
more akin to wrestling with an angel, aspiring to what your own work is
not yet? Perhaps both?

Sze: In the beginning, I turned
to translation as a kind of poetic apprenticeship. In 1971, while a
student at the University of California at Berkeley, I was searching for
my own voice and poetics. The T'ang dynasty masters Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Weioffered me very distinct voices and
challenges. I wanted to translate them in order to honor their
accomplishment but also to experience the poems from the inside out. By
writing out their poems, character by character, stroke by stroke, I was
able to engage with the poems on a deeper level and better understand
their process of creation.

Later on, in 1982, I was searching for ways to extend a lyric beyond 25
lines, and Wen I-to came to mind. I read his
poems carefully and felt that he extended the lyric, in a poem such as
Miracle, with great emotional power. And I thought his
juxtapositionswhich brought the grittiness of twentieth century China
into tension with the more traditional T'ang dynasty lyrical imageswere
stunning. In the case of Wen I-to, I translated his work because I felt
it would help me discern a new stage for my own writing. So the process
of translation has been wrestling with an angel as well as poetic
apprenticeship.

Seiferle: I first began reading Vallejo in the Spanish nearly
twenty years before I seriously undertook translating him. Did you
spend a similar period of time, when you read the poems in Chinese,
'lived' with them in a sense, before you undertook the actual process of
translation?

Sze:
When I read Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, I knew immediately that I wanted to
translate their poems. I didn't live with their work for a long time,
but I was deeply excited by it. I think I experienced that shock of
recognition that comes when one reads and experiences great poetry. At
that time, however, I read and was baffled by such poets as Li Shang-yin and Li
Ho. It took me over twenty years to come to appreciate their poetry.
In the early 1990s, I came back to Li
Shang-yin and Li Ho and was amazed at their
work. Li Shang-yin's untitled poems struck me as charged with longing;
they impressed me as some of the great love poems in classical Chinese.
And in the case of Li Ho: his obsessions with time and mortality, his
hallucinatory use of colors, his need to gallop on horseback each
morning for visionary fragments of poems to come to himall of this
struck me as hallmarks of a peculiarly modern poet. In these cases,
there was an enormous brewing time before I connected deeply with the
work.

Seiferle: How do you choose the poems or do they choose you? Are
you drawn by particular lines, the personality of the poet, or more
amorphous qualities, such as the atmosphere or feeling which the poem
conveys?

Sze:
Sometimes I choose the poems, and sometimes they seize me. In the case
of Wang Wei, I loved the sharp images, the
paradoxes, and intensity of his chueh-chu (quatrains). I read many of
them and sifted through to select the ones that most interested me. In
1975, when a friend recommended Wen I-to to me,
I didn't know where to start and happened to find his second collection,
Dead Water. The poems in that collection stunned me. I knew that
someday I would want to translate some of them, but, again, it took me
many years to feel ready.

Seiferle In your introduction, you say that your own
writing of Chinese is awkward and rudimentary, yet it's in the process
of drawing the characters that you come to sense the inner motion of
the poem in a way that I cannot by just reading the characters on the
page. Is this perhaps one way in which you begin to lay claim to the
translation, making the poem your own, by writing it in your own hand?
Do you write your own poems longhand and is sensing the inner motion of
each poem essential to that process?

Sze:
In writing the poem out in my own handwriting, I am trying to make the
poem my own, but that is only a beginning. I need to make an aside on
Chinese linguistics.
The Chinese language employs 214 radicals or root elements to the
language. You learn to write words, or characters, stroke by stroke, in
a particular order and direction. The Chinese language is also generated
through juxtaposition. For instance, the character bright is written
by writing the character sun and then the character moon. In many
ways, juxtaposition becomes a form of metaphor, with the equal sign
omitted. To write the character grief, one writes autumn at the top
and heart/mind below. The character autumn has two parts: tree tip
and fire (autumn=tree/s+fire). Grief=autumn placed next to, in,
heart/mind. Because of the complexity of juxtapositions that might
generate a single character, and because a poet might pursue radical
connections between characters, I need to write out each Chinese poem
stroke by stroke. It helps me physically experience the vision, tension,
architecture, rhythm and even silences to the poem.

Seiferle: You describe how you look up each Chinese character in
a dictionary and create word clusters, possibilities of meaning in
English. I wonder if this method of translation has effected the writing
of your own poetry. Do you go to the dictionary for your own work, do
you lay out fields upon the page, clusters of meaning?

Sze:
I never start my own poems by using a dictionary, but I sometimes find
it helpful in the process of creation. For instance, I wrote a poem in
nine sections, Quipu, that was recently published in
Conjunctions. Quipu is the Quechua word for knot, and it
turns out the Incas used bundles of string, or quipus, to record all
sorts of critical information: how many potatoes were stored in bins in
the mountainside, or the population of Cuzco, or historical information,
or even poems. A quipu had a main string and then subsidiary strings
that were dyed different colors, and different knots were used to encode
the information. When I was writing my poem, I looked up the simple
word, as, in the dictionary, and wrote out all of its possible
meanings. I didn't force myself to use all of them, but I consciously
used many of them. The varied meanings enabled me to layer and charge
the poem in an unusual way. The word as appears so innocuous, but each
time it's used, it has a knotting effect. So here is a concrete
example of how using a dictionary in translation work has fed my own
poetry.

.
Seiferle: You have translated a wide range of poets from the
great T'ang masters to contemporary poets. Could we follow the
trajectory of your own work by following the chronology in which you
have translated these various poets?

Sze: I think it's
dangerous to attempt a direct correlation between what a poet translates
and their own work. I think that I've absorbed and learned from all of
the poets I've translated: over time, to name just a few, I've been
drawn to the clarity of T'ao Ch'ien's lines, to the subtlety of Ma
Chih-yuan's lyrics, to the oblique exactitude of Li Shang-yin

Seiferle: Do you primarily translate between books or after
finishing a book or before just beginning a new body of work? Or do you
translate always or perhaps simultaneously working on a particular group
of translations while working on poems that share the same problems or
preoccupations?

Sze: I've translated poems, essentially, in three
periods: 1971-72, 1982-83, 1995-96. In 1982-83 and 1995-96, I did
translation work after completing a book. Doing translations helped me
reenergize and consider what to work on next. In 1982, the Wen I-to helped me envision how to broaden and
deepen a poem. That translation work helped me look forward. However, in
1995, the Li Ho, Pa-ta-shan-jen, and Li Shang-yin poems that were transformational
and challengingwere done almost in hindsight.

Seiferle: You note that you have included only those
translations which you consider finished. How do you know when a
translation is finished? What conveys that feeling of satisfaction?

Sze:
A translation will nag at me if it is unfinished. I will read or
reread it and recognize that some essential element is clumsy or
inadequate or missing. I'll put it aside, brood on it, and come back
when I can write with intensity and clarity. There are some translations
that I abandon: I've done my best but I'm dissatisfied. Those
translations I'm happy to toss. Others, over time, feel more and more
alive. I think it's the same with poems.

Seiferle: Are you at work now upon other translations? Your
later translations have been Li Ho and Li Shang-Yin, both as you
describe extremely challenging and condensed and writing a poetry full
of allusions. Is this the direction in which your interest still tends?

Sze: I'm not working on any translations at the moment. However,
I am reading a lot of Taiwanese poetry and am going to co-edit a feature
on contemporary Taiwanese poetry, with Michelle Yeh, for Manoa.
I'll be going to Taiwan in the fall to read at the international poetry
festival.

In terms of my own poetry, I'm interested in writing sequences
that braid together lyric, dramatic, and narrative strands. There are
moments that are disorienting and challenging, but they are part of the
process of re-envisioning the world.

Some of my new sequences begin with elegy and end with ode;
this is nothing new; the structure is as old as poetry itself, but the
particular path or journey is very contemporary.